The Homeland Recap: Breaking Up

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Season 2, Episode 11: "In Memoriam"

Too bad the Emmys don't have a Most Uneven category. Homeland would be the runaway winner.

If you've read my earlier write-ups, you know I've enjoyed a lot of the action sequences this season but found many emotional beats contrived and treacly. This episode was the reverse. Nothing about the Nazir-in-the-warehouse sequence made sense, not from the moment Carrie stumbled outside — in the dark. Apparently she'd been wandering around in there overnight, because if I'm not mistaken, she entered the previous afternoon, and it was nearly morning when she emerged. Meanwhile, dozens — if not hundreds — of heavily armed FBI agents had surrounded the place, but none went in until she came out? And then no one bothered to debrief her? ("I escaped" does not count as a debrief; the CIA and FBI would have wanted her to tell them about every minute Nazir had held her.)

The idiocies just kept piling up, scene by scene. The moment when Carrie glommed onto Galvez was nothing more than a lame excuse to take a swipe at racial profiling. And then Carrie figured out that Nazir was hiding in the tunnels. To which I can only say, what tunnels? The action all took place on the same floor. And how did Carrie manage to spot Nazir's hiding place in five minutes, after multiple highly trained FBI teams had missed it? Why was Carrie, unarmed and unarmored, tagging along with that last team, anyway? Then Nazir chased Carrie around in a scene straight out of a B-grade horror movie. (But, weirdly, didn't kill her when he found her, even though he could have — he'd just slashed the FBI agent's throat, so he must have had a knife, or at least really long fingernails.)

The final moment in the warehouse was the only one I did believe; Nazir would have been happy for martyrdom, and the FBI would have been happy to give it to him. Anyway, he's dead now, and to Homeland, that means just one thing: Carrie and Brody 4-ever!

This second season started with a ton of possibility. It could have shown us the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that Washington's power corrupts. It hinted it might go that way early on, when Jessica gave her fundraising speech and Dana fell for Finn. But it blew that plotline up with episode five's car accident, which turned all of the Waldens into L'etat, c'est moi caricatures. It could have turned into a cat-and-mouse game between Carrie and Brody, with Carrie aware that Brody had double-crossed her and Brody unsure of what she knew. But it cut that thread at the end of episode four, when the cat told the mouse exactly what she knew. It could have offered a serious discussion of American policy options for Iran and Israel, but as soon as the show returned from Beirut in episode two, the Israel-bombed-Iran story was forgotten. It could even have focused on Carrie's struggles with her mental illness, though that might have felt too much like season one. Instead, Carrie's illness simply vanished after about episode three — only Brody seemed to remember it.

Viewers of premium cable have grown to expect long, drawn-out plots, episodes that milk maximum drama with a minimum of forward movement. Homeland went a different route this year, blowing up viable storylines for seemingly no reason. In theory, the show's writers might deserve kudos for choosing to run at a higher metabolism. In fact, though, Homeland flailed wildly this season, showing why cable is paced the way it is. Tossing a story that's working only makes sense if you can replace it with something better, and Homeland couldn't.

Still, this episode had some nice moments. I loved seeing Roya work herself into a rage as she brushed aside Carrie's ridiculous and clumsy effort at empathy. We're so alike... Uh, no. Not so much. Not at all.

Mostly, though, I liked watching Jessica and Dana explain to Brody that they didn't need him anymore. Brody — like many an adulterer before him — seemed to think that his family would tolerate his lies and shenanigans at any cost, that they couldn't imagine life without him. But Dana told him straight out, and told him true: Mike was a better father than you'll ever be. And Jessica finally had the strength to push him away. She still loves him, but she knows their lives together are finished, and that they'll both be better off apart.

I feel the same about this season.

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Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter, writes the best-selling series of spy novels featuring John Wells, a CIA operative and Muslim convert. (Yup, like Brody. Though Wells came first.) His original Wells book, The Faithful Spy, won the 2007 Edgar Award for best first novel. The Night Ranger, the seventh in the series, will be published in February. You can follow him on Twitter and Facebook.